The number of tech conferences actually going ahead right now is astonishingly slim, with Google the latest company to scale back its plans. Its annual Google I/O conference will instead take an “alternative format”, most likely online.
Google has announced that its annual Google I/O conference, which was set to take place at the Shoreline Ampitheatre in Mountain View California won’t go ahead. As 9to5Google reports, Google is doing so as a precautionary measure relating to the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus.
The move follows cancellation of a lot of recent tech events, including MWC 2020 in Barcelona and GDC in San Francisco being “postponed”.
If you were one of the lucky few to actually score tickets following Google’s tricky puzzle game to reveal the actual dates of I/O this year, Google says it’ll provide a full refund by the 13th of March. Attendees who now don’t get to go will also be first in line with the option to book tickets for Google’s 2021 I/O event.
We are exploring new ways to connect and support our global developer community. Stay tuned.
More info soon → https://t.co/mSTQKlTa90 (2/2)— Google Developers (@googledevs) March 3, 2020
Just because it’s not hosting a physical conference event doesn’t mean that Google won’t have news to announce ” it doesn’t take much crystal ball gazing to see fresh details emerging around Android 11 at the very least ” as well as strong desire to connect with its developer community.
Google has historically live streamed just about everything to do with Google I/O anyway. It helps when you own YouTube in that respect naturally, so that’s quite likely going to be what Google opts for in place of a physical I/O event.
While the original Google I/O was set to take place in the US on the 12th to the 14th of May, Google is now technically freed from that timeframe and could opt to make news announcements entirely detached from its more developer-centric conference session topics.
A Google Australia spokesperson mirrored the Google Dev team’s Twitter comments in terms of the reasons for the cancellation, and also told Gizmodo Australia that affected developers could keep track of Google’s future I/O plans on the Google I/O blog.